Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major
cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on
the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified
central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with
other intelligence. It’s part of a program called TrapWire and it's the
brainchild of the Abraxas, a Northern Virginia company staffed with
elite from America’s intelligence community. The employee roster at
Arbaxas reads like a who’s who of agents once with the Pentagon, CIA and other government entities according to their public LinkedIn profiles, and
the corporation's ties are assumed to go deeper than even documented.

The
details on Abraxas and, to an even greater extent TrapWire, are scarce,
however, and not without reason. For a program touted as a tool to
thwart terrorism and monitor activity meant to be under wraps, its
understandable that Abraxas would want the program’s public presence to
be relatively limited. But thanks to last year’s hack of the Strategic
Forecasting intelligence agency, or Stratfor, all of that is quickly
changing.

Hacktivists aligned with the loose-knit Anonymous collective took credit for hacking Stratfor on Christmas Eve, 2011, in turn collecting what they claimed
to be more than five million emails from within the company. WikiLeaks
began releasing those emails as the Global Intelligence Files (GIF) earlier this year
and, of those, several discussing the implementing of TrapWire in public
spaces across the country were circulated on the Web this week after
security researcher Justin Ferguson brought attention to the matter. At the same time, however, WikiLeaks
was relentlessly assaulted by a barrage of distributed denial-of-service
(DDoS) attacks, crippling the whistleblower site and its mirrors, significantly cutting short the
number of people who would otherwise have unfettered access to the
emails.